Why a ‘brown thumb’, you ask? Well, I definitely don’t have a green thumb, but I like to delude myself think that I don’t have a black thumb. So I say ‘brown thumb’ and mean that I’m a mediocre plant caretaker.

Take this rose plant as an example. I saw it in the grocery store around Valentine’s Day and decided to get one and take it to work to brighten up my desk. There’s just one problem… I don’t have an outside window at work. I face the hallway so the plant would only get artificial light. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, as long as it GOT said light. I really should have taken it home on the weekend, instead of leaving it in the dark for those 2 days. When I returned on Monday it was a sad little plant, flowers dropping, leaves wilting. In other words, not good.

I don’t have a ‘before’ picture, but here’s what it looked like after I brought it home and trimmed the dead stuff and put it in a larger pot with good potting soil. This is now the ‘before’ picture as I attempt to nurse it back to health.

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When I think back on why I got into photography in the first place, it’s a convoluted story with no real start point – but those are the best stories, don’t you think? Or, at least, the start of something wonderful.

My own photography journey started when I was a wee one. I remember one board game I would play with my family, and one of the categories (it was like Trivial Pursuit, but not TP) was a picture and you had to figure out what the item was based on a picture of just a small part. My initial fascination with minute detail began there, I think. It was my favourite category (and I was pretty good at it!) and I would spend a lot of time looking at the pictures and seeing what part of the whole was focused on, and how that related to the whole. I learned that ordinary items can be extraordinary, depending on how you look at it.

As a child, I had a variety of cameras I used – a Brownie camera with block flash, a similar camera with an even bigger film roll and disposable cameras. I can’t remember when I got my first ‘real’ camera, but I think it was some time in high school. I didn’t get very far in my photography at that point for two reasons: 1) I wasn’t thinking like a photographer, which meant that 2) I wasn’t paying attention to what worked and what didn’t. (aiming the camera at the sky to take a picture of the stars, for example, was a whim that resulted in no picture, but I didn’t follow it up and figure out WHY it did work for me).

My first digital camera was a birthday present in 2004, and I quickly discovered what I WANTED the camera to do was not what it COULD do. And that was macro photography. I still have a fascination with the minute detail of things, a fascination that reached new heights during my Masters, when some of my little critters were examined by SEM (scanning electron microscope) and I was blown away by the detail at the micro scale.

So what does this all have to do with here and now, and this post? Well, one of the reasons I chose to get serious about photography was a desire to explore macro photography. And last night, with my new camera ( 😀 ) I did just that.

I was cleaning the kitchen and had trimmed the flowers Daryn got me for Valentine’s Day. The pile of dead flower stems and leaves were accented with grape stems from my evening snack. The pile looked so interesting, I pulled out my new camera, put on my macro lens, and snapped away! Hope you enjoy!